When you look at a student slouched in their chair, you don’t know if they’re bored, tired, or about to die. This is something that teachers always say. That split-second uncertainty used to be a small bother. Today, fentanyl is being passed around high schools in the form of pills that look like candy, vitamins, and pressed tablets. This makes it one of the scariest choices anyone can make on a Tuesday afternoon. English teachers, more than anyone else, live in that moment all the time now.
It’s possible that no one planned for this to happen. There was no policy meeting, no change to the curriculum, and no official announcement that said literature teachers will now handle possible overdoses along with their unit on The Great Gatsby. It happened slowly, like most institutional failures do: a school nurse position that wasn’t funded was left open, a counselor who had to deal with 400 students, and an administration that thought someone else was in charge of it. Because of this, the responsibility fell almost naturally on the people who spend the most time with teens: their teachers.
A social studies teacher in War, West Virginia, named Greg Cruey once talked about his job in a very direct way. “My job as a teacher is to be a first responder to poverty,” he stated. “If my students learn other stuff, too, that’s great.” That quote has stuck with teachers all over the country because it says what most people outside of schools won’t say: the classroom has become a social safety net, and the teacher is the only thing that holds some of it together.
That weight is much heavier now that fentanyl is involved. The drug is especially dangerous in schools because it only takes very small amounts to cause an overdose, fake pills look a lot like real ones, and teens usually aren’t good at spotting the signs in themselves or a friend. A student can take what they think is an opioid or a pressed Adderall and start to lose consciousness in just a few minutes. English teachers across the country say they have found students who aren’t paying attention in the back rows of their own rooms, in the bathrooms, or between classes.
In response, some schools have put Narcan, the nasal spray that can stop an opioid overdose, in their classrooms. On paper, that sounds like a good safety measure. In real life, this means that a literature teacher who is 34 years old and got into teaching because she loved Toni Morrison has to spot an overdose, give emergency medication, and keep a room full of scared 16-year-olds under control before the ambulance arrives. There’s a sense that the people making these choices have never been in a classroom and thought about what that tasks a person.
It’s not hard to understand the emotional cost. Teachers who have seen students overdose talk about feeling a certain kind of anxiety for a long time: they are more alert in class and tend to scan the room in ways they didn’t before. Some report difficulty sleeping. Others talk about a slow, grinding grief that builds up over the course of a student’s school years. A lot of them will say they’re not ready for this, and they’ll be right. A two-hour session to get certified in Narcan is not training. In this case, the liability is transferred.
It’s still not clear if the systems that are supposed to help these teachers—like mental health resources, trauma-informed professional development, and enough counselors—are even close to keeping up with the crisis. It looks like the honest answer is no in a lot of places. The problems that kids face every day are not being met by school budgets that are growing at the same rate.
We should not be afraid to look at what is going on in these classrooms. The people who teach English didn’t sign up to be first responders. They agreed to teach students how to read carefully and think clearly. Many of these students could use these skills in the future to help them get along in a world where fentanyl is quietly everywhere. The job in that form is already very tough. The version of life they’re living now is something most people could only handle for a week.
